Disappearances

Nathan Englander’s novel of political terror.

Early in Nathan Englander’s first novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases” (Knopf; $25), Kaddish Poznan returns home late one night to find an unsettling welcome at his apartment door: “He reached for the keyhole and—accompanied by the sound of metal against metal—discovered that there was no hole to be found.” Not on the wrong floor, not at the wrong door, neither drunk nor delusional, Kaddish sees that the keyhole, to which he has reliably found his way for twenty years, has, in his absence, disappeared.

Set in Buenos Aires in 1976, in the months after the coup that drove the Peronists from power, the novel contains many such disturbing erasures. Englander tells the story of a family’s losses during Argentina’s “dirty war,” when thousands of people were kidnapped and killed by the military government, becoming known as “the disappeared.” This morally fraught subject recalls Englander’s first book, the story collection “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” which revolved around the persecution of Jews through history and the problems of Jewish identity in the face of such a history. As in the stories, Englander’s approach to his dependably tragic subject remains dedicatedly ironic.

At the center of the novel’s carefully staged ironies is Kaddish himself: an Argentine Jew, a prostitute’s son, and a man who “takes money to desecrate the dead.” His name conjures the Jewish prayer of sanctification that is also a prayer of mourning, but his actions are the opposite of pious. Late at night, hammer and chisel in hand, he steals into the Jewish cemetery “established by the pimps and whores of Buenos Aires.” For descendants of those buried there who wish to avoid embarrassment, or reprisal from the capricious military junta, Kaddish offers “a face-lift for the family name”: he makes the names of disreputable forebears vanish.

The work earns Kaddish an inconsistent living and the scorn of his son, Pato. Nineteen, a college student and a pot smoker, an idealist but no revolutionary, Pato decries his father’s way of life and resents being brought along to assist in the nighttime defacements. Kaddish’s long-suffering wife, Lillian, meanwhile, still loves him, although her opinion of him has shifted: “She had married him and his thick neck for the strength they promised, for exactly the things he hadn’t delivered.” And where Kaddish facilitates erasure—at one point, Pato loses a fingertip to his father’s errant chisel—Lillian has become a broker against it: she sells insurance to people growing rapidly aware of all that could be taken from them, collecting “premiums against their worst fears.”

In the novel’s first third—against a background of tanks and soldiers occupying the city’s streets, bodies being tossed from apartment windows, and men Pato’s age being discovered with their throats cut—Englander shows a family bracing against the inevitable. “You cannot ever let your guard down in Buenos Aires,” Lillian thinks. “It’s like standing in the ocean and facing the beach. It’s up to you to know what’s behind you. Always there’s another wave coming.” Although Englander draws Buenos Aires quite sketchily—he depends more on a generic idea of the city—his evocation of the tensions the Poznans live under has nuance and power. In one scene, the family manages to clear a military checkpoint despite Pato’s having forgotten his identity papers. Afterward, Pato, humiliated to the point of tears, berates his father:

Kaddish told the boy to stop. He yelled at him to stop. Pato continued long enough for Kaddish to give up his yelling and go silent, and then—Lillian tried to deny it—Kaddish drove on, weeping even more loudly and woundedly than Pato had. Kaddish cried and drove and wiped his eyes on a sleeve. Lillian understood that it had gone too far and decided to bring it to a halt.

She was really about to when Kaddish pulled the handbrake, stopping their lane completely, and, engine running, got out. “Too much,” he said, through tears. He then wove on foot across that wide and beautiful avenue he’d been admiring. He maneuvered the lanes, slapping at the hoods of cars, directing himself out.

The understatement of the prose is well tuned to the presentation of strong emotion, and Englander provides a persuasive sense of the combustible mixture of external, political tensions and internal, domestic ones. The emotions of the family are Englander’s chief concern here, and Kaddish, the character with the clever name, becomes a man for whom we feel a full measure of pity.

As the novel unfolds, however, Englander seems unwilling to trust this deepening of Kaddish’s character, or even, perhaps, to trust his own development as a writer. He consistently undercuts seriousness with shtick, even as he raises the emotional stakes of the story. Soon, Pato becomes one of the disappeared, and the novel follows Kaddish and Lillian’s attempts to find their son and to endure his absence. Many scenes, told from the distinct points of view of the two parents, offer tender insights into their suffering, their desperation, their growing alienation from each other. And yet, as if in apology for such gravity, Englander devises a facile comic line that runs parallel to his tragic one, undermining the emotions that he has taken such care—and shown such talent—in cultivating.

Shortly before their son vanishes, for instance, Kaddish and Lillian—both of whom have enormous noses—get nose jobs. Readers of Englander’s stories, whose characters worry about hairy upper lips and unbeautiful Orthodox wigs, might see this rhinoplastic turn as a comic expression of ambivalence toward a fundamental feature of Jewish identity, but the caprice seems tonally irreconcilable with the events of the book. After Pato disappears, Lillian, overcome with grief and tears, finds that she has damaged her nose by blowing it too much; it has “broken free” from her face. Kaddish goes back to the doctor responsible in search of a remedy. The doctor asks what happened:

“Did she walk into a wall? Frisbees—ever since the Frisbee made its way south, they break many a nose.”

“Crying actually. She was upset and crying and it fell.”

“It collapsed on its own?”

“Came loose, more. She feels—we feel—it should be under warranty.”

“Crying is regular nose usage by any standard. I wish you’d clarified right off.”

“You’ll make it right. She wants her old nose back.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You work miracles. Work another.”

“I don’t even know what I’d use to reconstruct it. We’d have to fashion it from a rib. Maybe we can pull her femur if she doesn’t mind walking with a cane.”

“Not funny, Doctor.”

But of course it is funny. The question is whether it should be. “The most absurd things happen in life,” Nikolai Gogol wrote in “The Nose,” his own story about nasal wanderings. If Dostoyevsky reputedly said, “We have all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat,” a host of comic writers as diverse as Kafka, Grass, Heller, Vonnegut, Rushdie, and Foer might claim to have come out of Gogol’s Nose. Englander’s use of absurdist humor in the face of political terror clearly places him in this tradition, one that runs in tandem with a tradition in Jewish humor of mixing misery and laughter. Yet his imagination seems more vivid and resourceful when taking emotional situations head on, and his strategy of offsetting pathos with bathos seems willed; the nose joke comes off as more Catskills than Gogol. As the novel progresses, and Kaddish draws closer to being an embodiment of the prayer that his name suggests, Englander’s ironic sideshow risks the erasure of something far harder to achieve, and far sadder to see disappear. ♦